28 April 2016, Paris - The OECD, the International Organisation of Pension Supervisors (IOPS), and the World Bank are joining forces to help expand global data on private pensions. The OECD and IOPS currently collect a market-leading suite of statistics on private pensions as part of the OECD’s Global Pension Statistics database and annual Pensions Markets in Focus report. Initially the data included OECD countries, before being expanded to include IOPS members to create a broader picture of private pensions. The collaboration with the World Bank will enable the inclusion of data from emerging and developing economies that are not part of the OECD or IOPS.

“Our aim is to develop a more comprehensive and useful database of private pension statistics to guide our efforts to help more countries develop efficient, voluntary systems. By 2050, 80 percent of the elderly will be living in low-income countries, so we need to begin to expand the reach of our data to address this changing demographic,” said William Price, Senior Financial Specialist at the World Bank.

The next annual data collection exercise will start in April 2016 and the World Bank will help to expand the exercise to its developing member countries and encourage and support them in providing the data. These data will then flow in to the OECD’s Global Pensions Statistics database and the October 2016 Pension Markets in Focus report.

“This collaboration represents an important continuation of the close cooperation between the OECD, IOPS, and World Bank in the field of private pensions and underpins our shared desire to work to improve the outcomes from pension systems globally,” said Pablo Antolin, Head of the Private Pensions Unit at the OECD.